Samuel Porter Jones
(1847-1906), an American Methodist Evangelist was born in Alabama
and reared in Cartersville, Georgia. Jones was a lawyer but was a drunkard.
He trusted Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, being stirred by his father's
dying words. His life was dramatically changed, preaching his first
sermon one week following his conversion. He went on to live a full
and sober life, becoming one of the preeminent evangelists at the turn
of the century. He was known for his crude wit, coarse stories, and
opposition to the liquor traffic. Thousands were saved and cleansed
as a result of his ministry.

For Men Only

"Escape
for thy life!" (Genesis 19:14)

I want to invite your
attention this evening to a part of the fourteenth verse of the nineteenth chapter
of Genesis:

"Escape for thy life!"

There is in the bosom
of every man an instinctive love of life, and an instinctive fear of death.
Man has a spiritual nature as well as a physical nature, and there are certain
things which are death-dealing poisons to the moral and spiritual life as there
are things which are poison to the physical life. So the warning, "Escape
for thy life," means escape from sin. I intend to speak plainly to all
of you this evening. When a man preaches to me there are three questions I ask
of him: "Do you mean kindly to me, and are you my friend?" "Are
you posted on the subject you are discussing?" and "Do you love what
you preach?" You can tell whether or not I am your friend by the way I
speak to you; you can find out how I live by inquiring where I have lived, and
you will find out before I get through that I'm I intend to discuss.

Profanity

Now, I intend to discuss
some cardinal sins, and the first is the sin of profanity. What an awful sin
it is and how it has got into society. If I should say that the man who did
that would lie and drink, you would say that I am right; but if I should say
that the man who will swear will lie and drink, you would say: "Hold on
there, don't say that or there'll be a row; I swear sometimes." Now I tell
you that the man who will swear will do all the other things if you just take
the bridle off him and turn him loose, and the young man that stilts himself
upon his honor and integrity, and is a swearer -- I say that young man would
steal and crush the virtue of the sweetest maiden in this great city, if only
the obstacles that now prevent him from doing it were removed. The swearing
man that went into the army, stole and went to a house of ill-fame at night.
The bars were down. Don't you know that?

They say at when the devil
wants to catch any other kind of a sinner he baits his hook; but when he wants
to catch a profane swearer he just drops his hook without any bait, and the
poor fool just gobbles it up. The man who swears -- you can say what you please
about it -- the man who swears lacks just that much of being a gentleman. Those
men that swarm the railway trains. The railway trains have their fine chair
cars, and sleeping cars, and smoking cars, and they need now just one more car,
and that is the man that steals gets something, but the man that swears, what
does he get? You ask me if I stole when I swore, and I say "yes,"
I did. I stole the peace from my home and the roses from the cheeks of my wife,
and that was about as far as I could get without running against the sheriff.

Sabbath Breaking

The next cardinal sin
I want to talk about is the sin of Sabbath breaking.

See these men having all
the money that they can make during the week, and sometimes money that they
don't make and all for the purpose of going out Sunday and breaking the Sabbath.
Just go up to a crowd of those fellows and hear them. Hear the nasty, obscene
language and the miserable oaths they use. Why if a buzzard would come along
flying in the air above a crowd of those men, he'd get within about ten feet
of them and stop, and then say. "Whe-e-e-e-u," and spread his wings
and sail away. And I tell you, when a crowd of men get so low that a buzzard
won't come near them, they're pretty low. You say to me, "I don't like
these Sunday Christians." I tell you that I do. I tell you that the man
that keeps the Sabbath holy keeps every other day holy, and the man that violates
the Sabbath violates every other day in the week.

Gambling

Now, I want to talk to
you about gambling.

I have no respect for
those cotton gamblers and these speculators. I see that those fellows in the
East have made a spec, and there's going to be many a one squeezed. I am glad
that every now and then they catch some Ward or Fish and disgrace them. I wish
these Christians would quit speculating, I do indeed. I tell them it's wrong
to buck against futures, but you can't convince any of these old Methodist deacons
who's just won about $30,000 that gambling in futures is wrong; oh, no. He wouldn't
think that was any more wrong than it is for a goat to eat grass. But just let
him lose $30,000 and he'll come and say: "O, it's wrong to deal in futures."
The church raffles and lotteries are wrong, but the devil will help you to get
them up. The devil will help you to get up anything of this kind in the church,
but he charges you compound interest, and he'll sue you and levy on you when
you haven't got a cent. I know that. I've been there. I say to you, fellow citizens,
that people may talk about their gold and silver and greenbacks, and their hard
and soft money, but I say to you, let us have honest money. I'd rather have
one dollar I had worked for, that I had earned by the sweat of my brow, than
all the millions of Jay Gould.

Here is a young man getting
$50 a month. His livery stable is $25, Louisiana lottery tickets $10 or $15,
theater tickets $15, tailor's bill $25. Where does he get his money? I knew
a boy getting $40 and spending money like this in Atlanta, and one day his employer
took him into a room and backed him up against the door and said: "Now,
I know you are spending all this money. Where do you get it?" And the boy
-- aha! the boy said that his step-mother sent it to him. Now, how foolish that
was, for everybody knows that step-mothers don't send their boys any money.
I had a step-mother, but she never sent me money. Look at this boy that's just
won $10,000 in the Lousiana lottery, a concern which can't receive letters through
the mails, and you have to whip the devil around the stump to get your money
to it even. The money all goes in vile companionship and in pouring liquor down
his throat, and he hunts up something else which will give him a chance of getting
something for nothing. And here's the boy who has earned a dollar by hard work,
and he puts it covered with sweat in his pants pocket, and he puts his pants
under his pillow and goes to sleep, and that eagle on the dollar turns to a
nightingale and sings to him in his dreams. But the man who deals in cotton
futures can't blame his boy for buying Louisiana lottery tickets. A man told
me once "There's a man who's a cotton buyer, and he's one of the most honest
men on earth. He is so honest that he'll pay the poorest man, that can't read
or write, the fair price for his bale of cotton," and I felt like going
up to him and shaking hands with him and asking him if he didn't feel lonesome
among his associates.

Liscentiousness

I want to speak licentiousness.
It is the worst and most damnable of the cardinal sins. I was told not long
ago that this wave of licentiousness had involved half of our society, and if
it this is so I thought how long will it be before the mighty wave sweeps over
and engulfs the other half. Let us build a wall around the virtue of our pure
women a mile high. Oh, I believe that the most awful hell there is in the next
world is reserved for the man that tampers with the virtue of a pure woman;
and yet so our society is, that when such a thing as this happens, the woman
sinks down lower and lower and passes into oblivion, while he is lionized. How
different was the action of Christ!

This the evangelist illustrated
by the story of Christ and the woman taken in adultery. "Let him who is
without sin cast the first stone," and they all shrank away. There are
many of these poor creatures who are longing for other things and other lives,
and there are many of your St. Louis millionaires who would contribute thousands
toward the building of a house of refuge for them. The evangelist then discussed
libertinism and libertines, young and old, denouncing both in language far more
vigorous than that used by evangelist Varley, although he did not descend to
the indecent description and filthy detail of the London preacher. The immoral
husband he especially denounced, saying as he did so, that he knew very well
that he had in his audience a number of the very men of whom he was speaking,
concluding his remarks upon this sin, with:

"I have more hope
of any man than of the one who is in the power of licentiousness, and has given
himself up to it. We can do very little with the man who has yielded himself
up to an unhallowed alliance of this kind. We put our arms around him and try
to pull him away, but he clings to his sin.

Sin of Intemperance

In conclusion, I'm agoing
to tell you to beware of intemperance, the deadly sin of intemperance. This
the evangelist disposed of briefly. In St. Joseph he had angered the saloon-keepers
by speaking of their business, and he had heard that they were talking in an
aggrieved way of his remarks. He had gone to one of them and told him to meet
him and go with him to see the wife of a man who had sunk from respectability
to drunkenness and had committed a crime for which he was then in the penitentiary.
"Thus we will put our ears to her side and hear the lifeblood trickling
away, and then, if you say I have been unjust, I will get down on my knees and
beg your pardon." His own miserable experience as a drunkard was told from
the time he married his Kentucky wife to the time of his conversion "I
never had but one child who saw me drunk, and God took him away. I may, when
I was raving, have said something brutal to him. When I meet him in Heaven I
shall kneel down before him and ask him if this is true, and if it is I shall
ask forgiveness."

Now I want all of you
who think you will try to abandon or shun these sins I have spoken of to stand
up and let me see you.